Once upon a time in a galaxy not-so-far away (specifically, the 1980s), someone asked: “What if Star Wars, He-Man, and Heavy Metal had a baby… and that baby was raised in a video rental store?” The answer, dear reader, is Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, a movie so boldly bonkers, so gloriously awkward, and so utterly…
Tag: Star Wars rip-off
Starcrash (1978) – Review
Imagine if Star Wars were made by people who had never seen Star Wars but had only heard about it through an unreliable game of telephone. That’s Starcrash in a nutshell, a delightfully goofy, low-budget Italian rip-off of George Lucas’s space saga, filled with flashing lights, nonsensical dialogue, and the absolute conviction that every absurd…
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) – Review
There have been several films that have “borrowed” from Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, the most notable being The Magnificent Seven by Preston Sturges, but I doubt even Kurosawa could have dreamed someone would take his premise and re-imagine it with aliens, laser battles and a spaceship with large breasts.
Yor, the Hunter from the Future (1983) – Review
The 80s saw a big boom in sword and sorcery flicks, with Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian being the real kicking-off point for the genre, but unlike Conan, most of those films were shot with incredibly low budgets and even lower-ranked stars. Such was the case with Yor, the Hunter from the Future a film that…